The fact is, the wealth of the world is being redistributed, and the US and EU are coming up losers. China is gaining.

The wealth of the world is not being redistributed. China is making more money because they are manufacturing more, not because the money is being redistributed from the US or EU.

the fact that China is ascending, while we descend.

We are not descending. The US and EU economies have continued growing (albeit slowly) during China's ascent. The reason is because the world economy is not a zero-sum game, and wealth is not being transferred from the US or EU to China.

China may be dependent on us today, but what happens in fifty years, or a hundred?

China, the US, and the EU will all have first-world living standards, most likely.

We're selling off our great grandchildren's future.

We are not selling any important assets to the Chinese. ...The only thing the Chinese are "taking" from us are exhaustible, expensive, internationally traded commodities. such as Oil. Our great grandchildren wouldn't have had too much of that anyway.

What always fascinates me about this debate is how much cherry-picking of statistics is involved. In all cases, someone in the media or on a blog, cherry-picks some statistic out of the PISA test, then writes a headline like "Oh no! The US is falling behind and we're DOOMED!"

I've actually read the results of the PISA test. The results are surprising. The US is approximately average among the OECD countries, virtually indistinguishable from France, Germany, or the UK. Even the vaunted German education in science, is only modestly better than US education in science: 539 vs 502. Even Japan, which has a reputation for non-stop studying and cram schools and so on, scores 539 on science, vs 502 in the US. I'm using science as an example because it's the middle case: the US performs slightly better relatively on reading, and slightly worse on math, but not to any significant degree.

Most industrialized first-world countries are not very different from each other on the PISA test. China is much better, however China is widely known to cheat on this test, and they cherry-pick students from an elite high school in Shanghai rather than randomly from the population, so the Chinese results were prefaced by an asterisk on the PISA results until recently. Aside from the Shanghai Chinese results, most industrialized countries are not very different from each other. Take the science test as an example. Spain performs very poorly, at 489; and Japan performs very well, at 539. Almost all large, industrialized countries are within this range. There are one or two outliers (Finland is an example) but not many.

The only way in which the US educational system is demonstrably inferior to any other large, industrialized country is the proportion of students who score a 6 (the top score) on the math test. In this regard, a few countries (like Japan, Switzerland, and Korea) have ~7% of their students which score in the very top category of the math test while the US (and most other countries) has about ~2%. This is the only worrying statistic. China (Shanghai) has a fantastic score in this regard, but again it is cherry-picked.

The lesson of the PISA test is this: most rich countries are quite close together in almost all regards. However a few of them (Japan, Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan) have a small portion of their populations (less than 10%) who score very well in math.

Yep. Quality of code is pretty much a measurable thing. Looking at the things I identified in B above, if someone's code does not possess any of those violations, or if any such violation is rarely found, then that shows the person has done a best professional effort.

No. Code quality is definitely not a measurable thing, using any simple metric. Many people have tried to come up with some automated way of measuring code quality but nobody has even come close to succeeding. Measuring code quality is a hard problem.

Even if a programmer has done all the things you spoke of, it does not mean that he has done a "best professional effort". His code could be crap in all other ways. There are a million ways that code can be crappy, and new ones appear over time as languages evolve.

It would definitely be possible to prove negligence if a programmer committed certain obvious and well-known mistakes like not sanitizing input. This much could be detected using automated tools. Perhaps we could have negligence lawsuits for things like that. But that is not a measure of code quality.

Be careful about the source here. Actually track down the CBO report and verify that the quotation is not being taken out of context.

Where I live, physicians must pay $20,000-$90,000 per year for malpractice insurance, depending upon specialty (http://www.mymedicalmalpracticeinsurance.com/california-medical-malpractice-insurance.php#2010). Since there are 100,000 physicians in CA, we can guesstimate that $4-5 billion is spent on malpractice insurance just for CA, which is nearly as much as your source claims is spent for all medical malpractice for the entire country.

Here is another quotation from the dept. of Health and Human Services:

About 10 percent of the cost of medical services is linked to malpractice lawsuits and more intensive diagnostic testing due to defensive medicine, according to a January 2006 report prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP for the insurers’ group America’s Health Insurance Plans. The figures were taken from a March 2003 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that estimated the direct cost of medical malpractice was 2 percent of the nation’s health-care spending and said defensive medical practices accounted for 5 percent to 9 percent of the overall expense.

...which I gathered by typing the issue into google and following the link to a wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_malpractice).

Advanced math is used in business...In 20+ years of software development I have rarely used math beyond the most basic forms of algebra.

This has been my experience too. I'm a programmer, and I've found that I have less occasion to use advanced math than businessmen.

I just don't find your argument convincing at all. You claim that critical thinking is a "waste of time," and the evidence you offer is that some people fail at doing it. Does that show that critical thinking is a waste of time? Is Algebra a waste of time because some people who think they're good at it actually suck? It would seem to be a stronger argument if the people who succeeded at critical thinking still didn't benefit from it.

One need remember the full probability course to understand what is a correlation and why it doesn't imply causation.

I don't think this is true. There are many things in a probability course that don't need to be remembered in order to understand why correlation doesn't imply causation.

I think we are by far, less educated than our previous generations and it would be extremely detrimental to us to reduce the learning that students have to do today.

You're definitely wrong about this. The current generation is better educated than any previous one. Levels of education have continuously improved in this country, and everywhere in the western world, for the last 100 years. This improvement is apparent using almost any consistent and objective measure of educational achievement.

Not only that, but intelligence has also improved. IQ scales have been continuously revised upwards as people have grown smarter, at a rate of almost 1 point per year for a few years during the 1960s. The average adult in 1900 would score less than 85 on an IQ test today, which would make them borderline deficient.

Granted, the rate of improvement has slowed down considerably, during the last few decades. However your great-grandmother's generation was definitely not better educated on average than the current one.

It's not a mistake we're ranked so poorly in the world math standings.

This claim is often repeated, but it's not true. The US actually ranks reasonably well in world math standings. There are a handful of countries which rank substantially better (South Korea, Finland, Hong Kong and Switzerland are a few examples), and many which rank far worse, but the US ranks fairly high.

In the PISA test almost all large industrialized countries rank between 483 (Italy) and 529 (Japan), out of 600. Even the vaunted Japanese educational system does not produce far higher results. China ranks at 600, however they are cheating and "cherry-picking" students.

It does not appear that there are large differences in average outcomes between industrialized countries. There are a few notable exceptions, like Finland and South Korea, but almost all industrialized countries are clustered fairly close together.

I'm a computer programmer for a living. Furthermore, what I do is complicated. I don't just make plain web apps, or enterprise software with business rules (not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's easier than what I do). In my company I'm one of two programmers who does not have a PhD.

In my work I rarely use any kind of math above Algebra. Neither does anyone else here. When I do encounter math above algebra, it's usually some kind of bizarre, obscure math which I must learn about on my own, and my education was no preparation. I rarely use advanced math even though what I do is much more technical than 95% of the population.

I would guess that the author is correct that only 5% of the population routinely uses math above Algebra for their work.

That is a complete falsehood!

Chomsky relies heavily upon ad hominem arguments these days.

It appears he did coin the term "email" spelled without a hyphen. He certainly did not invent electronic mail, or any of the essential features of it.

I used to have great respect for Chomsky, but any respect I had for him died many years ago. In this case his arguments are just totally idiotic, and beside the point. Most of his article revolves around the capitalization of the word email, which is not the main point. Then he produces a quotation ("...no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system") from a particular guy working on one exact mail program, and concludes that nobody in the world prior to 1978 was working on full-scale inter-organizational mail systems either. That argument is just a joke.

Chomsky says: "[These statements] suggest an effort to dismiss the fact that innovation can take place by anyone, in any place, at any time", but that is just a weak ad-hominem argument. Here Chomsky is speculating about what people who disagree with him are trying to do ("an effort to dismiss...") rather than dealing with evidence.

Chomsky just doesn't say anything relevant to the actual evidence in this case. Nor does he offer anything that approaches valid reasoning.

Then Chomsky says "the facts are indisputable", but in fact, Chomsky has not listed or touched upon any of the main facts about this issue. Before the guy invented anything, there were already widespread, inter-organizational, electronic mail systems which had address books, named recipients, mail boxes, mail programs, cc: and bcc: fields, and everything else essential. These systems were already integrated, inter-organization systems. These are the actual indisputable facts. This guy was not the inventor of email, and in fact, appears not to have invented anything significant related to it. The only invention that this guy deserves credit for is being the first person to spell email without a hyphen.

He is claiming to have invented the first "full-scale, inter-organizational electronic mail system".

He did not invent the first full-scale, inter-organizational mail system. There were already such systems in widespread use for years before this guy did anything.

Ignore the name "EMAIL" and instead call it "EMAILSYSTEM", maybe that will help you calm down and act in a reasonable manner.

Strange, because the exact spelling of the word "EMAIL" is probably the guy's only related invention. Insofar as I can tell, he was the first person to use the term "email" spelled without a hyphen ("e-mail"). I think this is his only invention. By telling us to ignore it, you are denying him even that.

Oh really? So circa 1979 on ARPANet you had a single program that contained all these features: "defined user interface, database driven, inbox, outbox, drafts, address book, carbon copies, registered mail, and the ability to forward."

Yes. Read the RFCs. There were outboxes, inboxes, address books, CC, BCC, forward, and so on. Whether it's database-driven or not is an irrelevant implementation detail (in fact it was, but this doesn't matter). It was already a finalized standard, and widely deployed before this guy did anything.

Bear in mind that RFCs finalize things that have been under discussion for years.

He is claiming to the first to integrate all the traditional components of a "full-scale, inter-organizational mail system" into a single electronic version.

No. All of these things were already integrated. The RFC from 1977 is already a fully-scale, inter-organization mail system in a single electronic version.

It's not that hard to understand, but you keep wanting to put up and attack a straw man.

wtf? The parent listed facts only (" by 1975 was transmitting mail between US government agencies and academia throughout the US, Canada and Western Europe? The RFCs are there to prove it."). That is not a straw man.

Show me another program from ~1979 with all the features available in his "EMAIL" program and I will believe you, but I have yet to find one.

Then you're not looking very hard.

Even if this guy had been the first person to conceive of some exact combination of features (cc, bcc, etc), that still wouldn't make him the inventor of email. The basic idea of asynchronous message transfer across networks with named user recipients and mailboxes and programs called "mail" etc, had been around for years already.

I had a college professor who still used an 8KB Commodore PET. He stored his typed notes on cassette. On occasion he would print out a handout using his 8-pin dot matrix printer and then mimeograph it. I have no idea how he still got printer ink for the printer.

Unfortunately the pet only had enough ram to store a few pages, so if any document was longer than that, you had to establish a new file. Many of his handouts ended abruptly after a few pages.

Someone once tried to convince him to get a new computer. He responded: "You're talking to me about a new computer as if I NEEDED it."